I Cheated On My Boyfriend 3 Times, & I Learned I Was Too Immature For Love (melted snowflake alert)

When I was a freshman in college, I thought I met the love of my life. He was cool and fun and sexy, an older frat guy who was good at beer pong and knew exactly how to make me laugh. Within weeks of our first meeting, he became my official boyfriend. Within six months, we moved in together. Another six months later and we were engaged.

It was a whirlwind romance by any definition — except for the fact that I cheated on my boyfriend three times. Despite the heartache it caused, my experience with infidelity taught me a lot about love, relationships, and growing up.

Before college, I had been a serial monogamist. Since my first schoolgirl relationship at 14, I had several long-term boyfriends, and was never single for longer than two months at a time. I lost my virginity the summer before high school, and after that, had been sexually active with my subsequent partners. Despite my "experience," as my friends and future boyfriends would call it, I had no idea what it was like to be in a serious adult relationship — that is, until I went off to college.

That's when I met the man I would date, get engaged to, and inevitably cheat on. That's when I learned what a real romantic relationship was.

The beginning of my relationship with my college boyfriend was like a fairy tale. We were inseparable: He walked me to class, studied with me in the library, ate meals with me, and slept over nearly every night. We partied together on weekends, got to know each other's friends, and started talking about The Future. I was 18, and although I had been in what I had considered a "serious" relationship before, this was the first time I had the freedom to explore what I thought an adult relationship was supposed to be like — love, sex, drama and all.

The first time I cheated on my boyfriend, I wrote it off as a foolish mistake. I was drunk at a concert with a group of friends who found some cute boys for us to hang out with. After a half-dozen 20-ounce beers, a couple of joints, and a few sexy country songs, could I really be help accountable for my drunken actions? I loved my boyfriend, after all, and I knew we were going to be together forever, so what was one stupid mistake?

Even though I tried to write it off as insignificant, a week after I cheated I fessed up to my boyfriend out of sheer guilt. His face crumpled as I admitted, as he had suspected, that something did happen the night of the concert I didn't want to tell him about. His eyes burned with anger when I tried to tell him the same excuse I had been telling myself: I was drunk, and it didn't mean anything.

Eventually, he did forgive me, but after cheating, there was a distance between us that no amount of time seemed to be able to close. Something had changed in our relationship, and it wasn't just broken trust on behalf of my boyfriend. It was an uneasy feeling in my gut and a tiny voice in my head that said, But what if you did mean it?

Something had changed in our relationship, and it wasn't just broken trust on behalf of my boyfriend. It was an uneasy feeling in my gut and a tiny voice in my head that said, But what if you did mean it?

The second time I cheated on my boyfriend was no drunken mistake, and both of us knew it. After partying with friends, I ended up at a former crush's house and quite predictably, one thing lead to another and we slept together. The next day, that uneasy feeling in my gut had some company: pure guilt, and an overwhelming sense of being a truly terrible person. The voice got louder too, and started to say more: You did mean it, and this won't be the last time this happens, either.

When I cheated on my boyfriend for the third and last time, he wasn't actually my boyfriend — he was my fiancé. Despite the bumps in our relationship, a combination of our feelings for one another, a heavy dose of hormones, and the idea of finding happily ever after kept hurtled us towards a disastrous engagement that would only last seven uncomfortable months.

A month before it all fell apart, I cheated on my then-fiancé with another former crush, and even before our lips touched, I knew I was doing something wrong, but that I wouldn't regret it. I needed this infidelity to get me out of my relationship, something I knew deep down needed to happen, but something I was too weak and too immature to do on my own. So I cheated — again — and it served as one last sign that not only were my fiancé and I not meant to be, but I was not mature enough to really be with anyone.

That's the biggest lesson cheating taught me: that fidelity is an exercise in trust and maturity, one that not everyone can perform. I certainly couldn't at age 20, and it showed me that not only was I not ready for a serious monogamous relationship with my ex, but that I was not ready for a serious monogamous relationship at all. I may have felt like an adult, but I didn't have the relationship experience, communication skills, patience, or empathy to embark on a forever kind of love I so desperately wanted to have. I was selfish, uncaring, immature, and too caught up in the idea of what relationships are supposed to be, rather than what my relationship was actually like.

Cheating ripped away the false narrative about my relationship that I had created — we were in love, and with love came pain and drama — and instead illuminated my love, or lack thereof, for what it was: hurtful and ugly and so necessary for me to become the faithful person I am today.

They say once a cheater, always a cheater, but after my experience, I can say that phrase is patently false. Cheating on my boyfriend multiple times taught me invaluable, albeit painful, lessons in love and relationships, on adulthood and maturity, on growing up. My actions showed me that relationships take a lot of work, not just together, but within oneself. It can't be forced, it can't be rushed, and it can't be half-hearted. When it is, people — yourself, your partner, your loved ones — get hurt.

total drama queen this one...

when people think about love, they often imagine whirlwind romances, soul mates, and high school sweethearts who are each other’s first (and last) everything.

They don’t usually usually think about rebound relationships.

After six years, a long-distance stint, a few break-ups, and one dog later, I can tell you with certainty not to count the possibility out, because my rebound became the love of my life. It wasn’t exactly the fairy tale I had always imagined (or, rather, the Cinderella story I had been taught to expect), but it turned into something I never thought I would find: Real, true, lasting love. .

And it all started with a breakup. I was 19 years old when I got engaged to my college boyfriend. I said yes when my then-boyfriend of a year asked me to marry him with a cheap, too-small ring on the side of the road during an argument — I was young, hopeful, naive, and swept up in the romance of it all. I should have known then that a proposal during a fight wouldn’t end well — or when I didn’t call my family and tell them for nearly a month, that I wasn’t sure about the decision. But I jammed the trinket around my ring finger and pretended like I was the happiest girl in the world.

And for a minute, maybe I was. But a little over sixth months later, I broke things off and entered one of the messiest periods of my youth — days and weeks of emotional fights with my ex, bad decisions with other guys in my life, excessive drinking, and a lot of second guessing and self doubt.

Through it all, though, there was one solace, one saving grace: The roommate who had lived with me and my ex-fiance (wow, that sounds weird) — a man that I would one day realize was my soulmate, if such things exist.

After my breakup, I turned to this person, J, for a friendly shoulder to lean on, someone to watch movies and study with, a healthy distraction from the otherwise unhealthy shit storm that was my life. It didn’t take long, though, for it to become something so much more than that.

We gradually grew from roommates who sat on opposite sides of the couch from one another, to friends who sheepishly held hands when no one was looking, to a full-blown couple who wasn’t afraid to share the appropriate level of affection in public.

But as we grew less shy about our feelings for each other, my friends grew less shy about sharing their opinions. They questioned my decision to “stick with my rebound,” and my own internal voice started to question our laid-back relationship, too. Could this relationship really be something, or was it just a pit stop on my way to finding the real happy ending?

Popular culture and mainstream women’s media often portray rebound relationships as a combination of availability and vulnerability, a placeholder on your way to the real thing, a tool that temporarily numbs the pain of your last break up.

These are all things I’ve bought into and believed for most of my young adult life. When I found my own “rebound” in J, my friends never ceased reminding me that this person, this relationship, was only meant to be a detour, a distraction from my true pain, and a growth experience that would help me become the woman I was meant to be for the man I was meant to be with.

Turns out, everyone else was wrong, because as the song goes, my rebound and I found love in a hopeless place.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I decided — labels be damned — that my rebound was just a relationship, not something that needed to be classified, picked apart, and examined by onlookers who had certain expectations for my future. I don’t know if it was a smile he gave me, or a particularly romantic evening out, or one of our favorite lazy Sunday mornings over hot coffee and an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. All I know is that, eventually, I saw our relationship for what it was: A partnership built by trust and friendship, and nurtured by love.

Our relationship hasn’t always been rainbows and puppies — we’ve had plenty of fights, lived apart for over two years, and even broke up a few times (or, as Rachel and Ross so delightfully describe it, “went on a break”). But now, after six years together, I can say with certainty that labels don’t mean a thing. Timing is weird, and things rarely happen when you want them to, but life has a funny way of working itself out in the end (that is, if you work your ass off to make it work out). Having a partner at your side doesn’t hurt, either.

I don’t believe things happen for a reason. I don’t think I broke up with my fiance so I could find my true love, and I don’t think he was my rebound because he was meant to be my rebound. I think we made a connection, and not knowing where it could take us, we decided to explore it together, eventually creating a loving, supportive, and lasting relationship — despite what everyone said about our origin story.

So maybe my rebound is the love of my life, but if this experience has taught me anything, it’s this: It doesn’t matter where your story starts, all that matters is how you choose to end it. https://hellogiggles.com/love-sex/relationships/how-my-rebound-became-the-love-of-my-life/

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